Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  They came back a week later, as promised. As he let them in the door, Jorgensen thought he noticed just a hint of a smirk on Jessica Woodruff’s face, her way of letting him know that she’d been the culprit, that leaving the drawings had been her idea.

  Even then, he tried to say no. But the drawings had done their work on him; he knew that, and they knew it, too; they must have been able to see it in his eyes.

  The fog had rolled in, and even though it wasn’t actually raining, you got wet after a while if you stayed outside. And although Jorgensen was used to it and dressed for it and wouldn’t have minded, his guests had their city clothes on. So they went inside, pulled up chairs and gathered around his kitchen table once again, the four of them, and Jake went off to one side of the room, circled a small area a couple of times, and lay down. And they began to tell him the story of Wesley Boyd Davies.

  The year 1964 was a strange one in the black South, a year of confusion and contradiction. The sudden death of a young Northern president, who’d spoken of hope and justice and opportunity for all, was still fresh in the minds of many. A Texan slept in the White House now, a Texan with the sleepy-eyed look and lazy drawl of a Southern plantation owner, but whose speeches were full of notions about civil rights and a Great Society. Meanwhile, half a world away, a white man’s war was being fought against yellow men, but it seemed to be mostly black men who were coming home in body bags. And a nation that was too short of money to feed its hungry children and repair their dilapidated schoolhouses was eagerly spending billions of dollars to strap a man into a spaceship and send him to the moon to gather rocks.

  Just about halfway through the year, in the early afternoon of the twenty-sixth day of June, four miles outside of the little, town of Sweetwater, South Carolina, a child was born to Hattie McDaniel. Although it was her sixth child - and she would go on to bear two more thereafter - it would be her only son. The boy was given a form of his father’s first name as his last, but little else from the man, a migrant farm worker who’d caught a truck north several months before the birth, never to return. Thus, right from the beginning, Wesley Boyd Davies stood apart from his siblings in three distinct ways: He was a boy; he was the only one in the family to carry the Davies name; and his sisters would make a contest of seeing who could spoil him the most.

  But there were other, more ominous differences.

  Because Boyd - as everyone called him, except the youngest of his sisters, who to this day refers to him as “Boy” - was born at home, attended by an unlicensed midwife, there are no medical records associated with his birth. Hattie has been dead ten years now. Asked once about prenatal care, she’d replied to an investigator that she went for “reglar checkups,” but was unable to say where or by whom they were administered. Boyd’s early pediatric history is almost as elusive. The only record of his first three years is to be found in a six-line entry subpoenaed years later from the Defiance, South Carolina, Children’s Hospital.

  The boy appears to be healthy and well-nourished, and suffers from no obvious deformities. He makes poor eye contact, however, and displays little or no speech. In addition, his head seems to be a bit large for the rest of his body.

  Developmental disabilities often go largely unrecognized in preschool years, all the more so in poor (and poorly educated) families. In Boyd Davies’s case, there were additional reasons for this to have been the case. Hattie had to have been preoccupied with the business of trying to feed, clothe, and nourish a houseful of children on a welfare check. The task of tending to the young ones often fell to older siblings, who were themselves still children. Their response was to do their best to satisfy the baby’s needs, and to even anticipate those needs in order to head off crises. Thus, when they figured Boyd might be getting hungry soon, they fed him; when they thought his diaper might be wet or soiled, they checked it; if they saw him fidgeting, they picked him up, handed him the nearest toy to distract him, or rocked him. Rocking seemed to work best of all.

  Given such immediate attention to his perceived needs, an infant has little motivation to develop speech (which, early on, is pretty much a matter of asking for things). So if Boyd was literally speechless for the first three or four years of his life - and by all accounts that appears to have been the case - nobody worried about it too much. After all, he seemed to be getting whatever it was he wanted, without ever having to fashion his wishes into words.

  All that changed with the beginning of school. By the age of six, children are expected to be verbal, noisy, and downright rambunctious. Boyd Davies was none of those things. Not that he was mute; that much was clear. But his utterances seemed to come in the form of single words, often monosyllables, or short phrases repeated over and over. And what he said often seemed to have no connection to what was going on around him at the particular moment. Thus, if his teacher were trying to interest the class in learning the names of various geometric shapes, Boyd might be heard to mutter, “No dogs, no dogs, no dogs.”

  It was assumed that he was retarded, and at some point in second grade, he was pulled out of class one day and administered a battery of tests. This was 1971 now, and developmental psychology had already advanced to the point of recognizing that, particularly in impoverished rural areas, intelligence testing was of little value if it was overly skewed toward either verbal skills or accumulated knowledge.

  No written record exists of how Boyd Davies performed on the tests he was given. But one of his teachers, a woman by the name of Lavender Washington, who is today in her eighties, says she remembers.

  “Boyd did terrible in vocabulary,” she told an interviewer. “And when they asked him word relationships - like, ‘Cow is to milk as hen is to what?’ - he had no clue what they were talking about. He couldn’t say who was the president of the United States, or what day of the week it happened to be, or anything like that. But when they showed him pictures of blocks - you know, big stacks of blocks where you can see some of them, but others are hiding behind them, and you have to figure out how many there are altogether - he got a perfect score on that, he did. And in the next part of the test, where they’d show him something, like a book or a pencil or something more complicated, say a radio? And then they’d take it away after a minute, and ask him to draw it, from memory? Well, let me tell you. That boy drew like a regular grownup artist, he did. It’s a crying shame they didn’t save some of those drawings he made, it really is.”

  As for the individual who’d administered the test, he (or perhaps she) had been understandably confounded, concluding that Boyd was of normal, or possibly even exceptional, intelligence, but suffered from some sort of mysterious learning disability that prevented him from reading and properly developing language skills.

  Today, remedial classes and special instruction might offer some hope to such a child. One-on-one tutoring has proved successful in certain cases. But again, this was the early ‘70s, and such things were unheard of in rural black schools in the South. Instead of receiving help, Boyd Davies was simply held back in second grade for another year, and another after that. He never did learn to read or write, and his speech improved only slightly over the years. And, simply by not moving forward with his age group, he naturally became the biggest and strongest in each of his classes. That fact, when added to his strange behavior and virtually nonexistent social skills, soon branded him as a target for the name-calling, petty insults, and sadistic pranks of crueler and cleverer children. And despite Boyd’s generally passive nature and his tendency to be withdrawn and even isolated, on rare occasions, he reacted by emerging from his shell and lashing out at his tormentors.

  For that, he earned the reputation of a bully.

  As for his uncanny drawing ability, little encouragement was given. Instead, his talent was viewed as so completely out of character as to be unnatural and even freakish - something to be discouraged, if not forbidden altogether.

  “The thing was,” says Lavender Washington, “Boyd didn’t draw like you or I migh
t draw. You handed him a crayon or a pencil and a piece of paper, and told him to draw something he’d seen, and he’d just start off doing it like some kinda machine you’d a wound up, and he’d keep at it until he was finished. It didn’t seem a part of him, it really didn’t. And back in those days, there was folks who believed in spirits and devils, and stuff like that. And there was some who even whispered that the boy might be possessed, if you know what I mean.”

  In late June of 1976, when Boyd had just turned twelve and the rest of the nation was preparing to celebrate the Bicentennial, the family was burned out of its home. The fire was termed “suspicious” by the local volunteer rescue company, and there were some who thought it might have been a race-motivated case of arson. Around that time, there had been a dozen or so such instances, with bands of black youths breaking into and looting white-owned stores in town, and older whites retaliating by firebombing homes in “Niggertown,” as they called it.

  There was a second theory that made the rounds. Boyd Davies was known to play with matches. Not that he liked to set fires, at least not so far as anyone can say with certainty. But several of his sisters recall that he could spend an hour with a box of matches, striking one after the other, watching intently as the flame burned down toward his fingers. By one account, his fingertips were often blackened and burned, though to watch him, he never seemed to notice the pain. This phenomenon contrasted sharply to the way he reacted to other stimuli. Bright lights, for example, could cause him acute distress, and certain common household odors he found so intolerable that they’d cause him to run from a room in anguish.

  In any event, while it’s possible that one of Boyd’s matches caused the fire that destroyed the family home, no one knows for sure. But even if it did, it’s highly unlikely that Boyd intended the result.

  Hattie McDaniel had a sister living outside of Pittsville, Virginia, about halfway between Lynchburg and Danville and not much else. Her sister had come down with polio in the mid-fifties, had been left badly crippled, and had recently lost her husband. For two years, she’d been trying to find someone to help her take care of her house. Now, no doubt out of need as much as devotion, Hattie answered the call. She piled six of her children (one had died, two had found husbands and moved out) and all of her worldly belongings into the back of a truck belonging to a farmer she’d paid $50 cash. The truck broke down five times; the farmer spent almost as much time underneath it as he did behind the wheel, and the 300-mile journey ended up taking them the better part of four days. But when it was done, Boyd Davies was a Virginian.

  Which, for some, might conjure up visions of early colonists, country gentlemen, and Confederate soldiers. For August Jorgensen, all that came to mind was that in the thirty-four years since the U.S. Supreme Court had reopened the door to capital punishment, Virginia had established itself as the execution capital of the Fourth Circuit, ranking second nationwide only to Texas in the number of men put to death.

  The local school board, at that time centered in Leesville, had a no-exceptions, “all-pass” policy, meaning that students moved ahead one grade - and only one grade - each September, no matter how poorly (or, for that matter, how exceptionally) they might have done during the previous school year. This policy they not only applied to Boyd Davies, but applied retroactively. For Boyd, it meant that his three holdbacks (in addition to spending three years in second grade, he’d also been required to repeat third grade once) were summarily overruled, and when he showed up for classes that fall, he found himself not in fourth grade, but in seventh.

  Junior high school.

  To someone like Boyd, who’d struggled unsuccessfully to keep up with children half his age (but presumably had been able to take at least some measure of comfort from surroundings that were familiar and teachers who knew him), one can only imagine how disorienting the change must have been.

  Records have a way of disappearing over time, and today there remains virtually no paper trail to chronicle Boyd’s adjustment to his new school surroundings. From the accounts of his sisters and other anecdotal evidence, however, it seems to have been marginal at best. By seventh grade, students are expected to have mastered reading and writing to the point that it’s second nature to them, to be proficient in math and science, to be on their way to learning a second language and in some cases a third, and to have developed the social skills needed as adults. Boyd, of course, mastered none of these things. He was given failing marks in just about everything, and after a while, no marks at all. Again he was tested, and although no record of the tests can be found, one of his sisters reports that again he was found to possess certain aptitudes that prevented the school from classifying him as “retarded.”

  Among his classmates, Boyd was a complete outcast. But there exists some evidence that younger students occasionally sought him out as a playmate; and if so, this wouldn’t be an altogether surprising phenomenon. After all, Boyd had grown accustomed to being around children much younger than he was. What he lacked in skills and socialization, he made up for in size and strength.

  It was an uneasy alliance, however, and one that would ultimately figure in Boyd’s undoing.

  Boyd was promoted to eighth grade along with his classmates in 1977, and the following September, he entered high school. There, for the first time, he ran into teachers who openly questioned whether it made any sense for him to be in school at all. Although he’d shown no signs of violence, he tended to speak out in class inappropriately, his out-of-context remarks (and sometimes they were not so much remarks at all, but mere sounds) producing distractions for his teachers and those of his classmates who were more intent on learning than being entertained. Several teachers complained to the principal, who promised to look into the matter.

  In December of 1978, a determination was made that for the good of both Boyd and his fellow students, he would be reassigned to a special school in Roanoke. But Pittsville was nearly fifty miles from Roanoke, and well outside the school bus routes. The president of the school board informed Hattie McDaniel that he was willing to reimburse her at the rate of a nickel a mile if she would drive her son to and from classes; but without a car, Hattie was in no position to take him up on his offer.

  So in the end, Boyd simply stopped going to school. His last day was January 31, 1979. He was fourteen years old.

  If idleness is, indeed, the devil’s workshop, Boyd Davies was being offered an open invitation to hell. With no school to fill his hours, and his mother busier than ever caring for two younger siblings and a crippled sister of her own, Boyd found himself left alone for long stretches of time. And if there was one thing he was good at, it was being alone. Not that he ever seemed to do anything, according to most accounts. Instead, he’d sit around the house or take up a spot on the front steps, or wander off into the surrounding fields. He’d find some object - it could be a rock, a pine cone, an old license plate, an empty plastic bottle - and spend hours holding it up to the light, examining it from all angles, touching it to his tongue, even muttering to it. The things he muttered never made any sense (at least not to anyone but Boyd himself); yet he repeated them over and over, his voice never changing in volume, pitch, or inflection. His family was content to leave him be, grateful that at least he wasn’t getting into trouble.

  But trouble can be a funny thing, and sometimes it has a way of seeking out its victims. Boyd Davies’s strange remoteness, which confounded his own family and repelled his age peers, for some reason attracted younger children to him. Not always, and not a lot of them, but a discernable pattern was beginning to develop. At fourteen or fifteen, Boyd’s only friends - and the term friends may be something of an overassessment here - were youngsters of seven or eight. They tended to be outcasts themselves, unwanted at home and for a variety of reasons ignored or ridiculed by their own classmates. Perhaps they found Boyd no more than uncritical of them; given Boyd’s limited ability (or willingness) to interact with anyone, it’s doubtful they could have found much more
. But for whatever reason, they were drawn to him - to sit with him, play in the dirt alongside him, and on some level share the strange, silent world he inhabited.

  If it was a pattern that seemed harmless enough, and one that even suggested a bit of a symbiosis for the older child and the younger, in time it would come to have the very gravest of consequences.

  As August Jorgensen sat listening to his visitors, the afternoon wore on. From time to time, he would excuse himself, rise from his chair, and add a log or two to the stove, to keep ahead of the chill. One of the problems of the old lighthouse was that it was extremely difficult to heat. Poorly insulated when built, it had developed cracks and chinks in the masonry over the years, and the fittings around the portholes had chipped away badly. A spiral, metal staircase wound itself from ground level all the way up to the light chamber, a full seventy-two feet above, and there was simply no effective way to trap the heat in the lower rooms. Interior walls and doors had been added in the mid-fifties, but they were anything but airtight. The result was that - along with its other virtues, faults, and idiosyncrasies - the structure provided indisputable laboratory proof of the old proposition that heat rises.

  That said, it was still October, and had it not been for his guests, Jorgensen might not have had a fire going in the stove at all. He’d long ago learned the value of long johns and wool sweaters, and was accustomed to 55 degrees or so as a tolerable indoor temperature for the fall months. His Scandinavian upbringing, he attributed it to.

  But it wasn’t the indoor conditions that concerned Jorgensen at the moment, so much as what was going on outside. The cooler, drier air that had settled in was thirsty for moisture. And though summer was long over, the ocean was still warmed by the Gulf Stream, as it flowed north from the Caribbean, hugging the seaboard up the length of Florida and the Carolinas, where it would be shoved out a bit at Cape Hatteras, only to find the coast again and follow it all the way up to Cape Cod, before running into Maine and Nova Scotia and being turned out to sea for good.